Mobile Justice – ACLU's app for recording police encounters - <AUTHOR> https://www.mobilejusticeca.org/ <comment><USER2> > 10\. How long will the ACLU keep information we receive through Mobile > Justice CA?

> The ACLU may delete the information you send.

What's with the non-answers? This is their FAQ. If you're not going to answer a question you published, why publish it in the first place?

<comment><USER3> I agree that this is a non-answer for most people, but my response was to read it RFC style, -- "The ACLU MAY delete the information you send" (i.e. implies that they will keep it for as long as they want, and at the current low cost of storage, probably forever).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In theory, I love it.

In practice, what's to stop the officer from confiscating and/or damaging/destroying your phone, before it has stopped recording and thus before it has sent anything at all to the ACLU? Worse, their faq seems to indicate that after stopping recording there is a survey that you either have to fill out or cancel before the video is transmitted.

The technology exists to stream the video, as it's recording, in real-time to the ACLU (I think). What is the ACLU thinking by ignoring this obvious flaw?

<comment> irq-1 Not uploading immediately and having a form to fill out is almost unbelievable; in what situations do they think this will be used?

If storage and bandwidth are the issues, would sending ONLY secure hashes help? It'd be fast and cheap. It'd prove that a video was taken, and stop any tampering. On the same idea, the app could send low-res photos once per second, depending on bandwidth.

Now that I think of it, a P2P system would really be ideal: videos jump to other nearby devices running the app. They could be deleted after the person uploads, or a set period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> these are awesome, but I see them more as band-aids, rather than attacking the real problem.

Defining the problem will vary depending on our individual political and philosophical bent, but in general, we can start discussing broadly when they should be encounters in the first place, the factors that lead to them, and reduction of such encounters.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Especially considering that the majority of law enforcement are there to do the right thing for the right reason, I believe that we need to be careful to not send the impression that we should assume there is an assumed potential for wrong-doing in every person with a uniform. Just as important is an avenue for sending videos to relevant organizations of criminal executing criminal acts.

The economic divide is the first place to start in terms of fixing this issue in the long-term; raise the dignity of life of every person in this country and I believe the road to healing can begin.

<comment><USER7> > Especially considering that the majority of law enforcement are there to do > the right thing for the right reason

Let us suppose three categories of police officers:

a) bad cops

b) cops who generally act good themselves but who will lie and cover for bad cops

c) good cops who will arrest bad cops when they see them doing bad, and testify against them, and otherwise act against them, despite peer pressure not to do so

When people say "most cops are good", they are saying that group a) is small, which for the purposes of argument I will agree with. But the fact is, there are almost no cops in group c), and whenever one is discovered, they are pushed out of the police force as quickly as possible. And I consider group a) and group b) to both be "bad cops". There are lots of cops in group b), who consider themselves good, but who should be considered to be part of the problem.

> assumed potential for wrong-doing in every person with a uniform

Why would a uniform eliminate one's potential for wrong-doing?

<comment><USER6> I don't mean to say a uniform eliminates a person's capacity for wrong-doing. I mean to say that for a system to work, we ought not assume wrong-doing automatically when we see the uniform, despite the news. Understand, swap "uniform" with the skin color or nationality of your choice and the same should be true.

As hacktivists and influencers or social change, we should have other means in place to make sure justice is done, and be careful not to participate in reverse racism or painting an institution initially placed for good as the enemy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The license prohibition on reverse engineering rubs me the wrong way, not that I'd bother to do that. This app should be open source, especially if it is used to gather evidence for use in court.</comment>


Digg Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://about.digg.com/node/564

<comment><USER2> For someone who knows nothing about NoSQL and decent with MySQL, can someone give a brief Idiot's overview of how NoSQL works? If I add a record in say a table named "news", where is the data stored? If I need to do a search by news id or description, what's the front-end api like and what happens at the backend when the api is called?

<comment><USER3> I would very seriously recommend reading the journal paper on Amazon Dynamo which is the predecessor to Apache Cassandra: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon- dyn...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dynamo- sosp2007.pdf)

PS: Why aren't we in the habit of citing papers like this? So many links are to websites rather than direct sources, and the info in papers is usually highly readable and extremely informative about the details.

<comment><USER4> I agree so much! Most blogs fail to sumarize such papers properly. And if I want a summary or introduction, I can get find those in the papers, too.

The same with RFCs and W3C documents. All that stuff is written very well, from the technical view as well as regarding their readability. Why putting a layer of blogs and websites around them, which actually lower the perceived quality?

Also, I'm frequently annoyed by articles that write about what some other people (e.g. RMS) wrote. These aren't much shorter than the source article, and aren't written nearly as clear as the original.

I appeciate it when an author just links to the source and elaborates on that topic, stating his own opinion, and perfers to quote rather than to paraphrase what's already clearly written in the source article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm looking pretty seriously at MongoDB and I've heard that Cassandra is worth considering. I do a lot of data warehousing / statistical analytics which generally means some sort of star schema-based reporting with lots of crosstabs, dimensions, etc.

If anyone can relate their experience with either of these two platforms, would either be a good choice for live querying for these types of applications? I know you can use MapReduce to eventually get the data you need, but I need to support queries that respond in (well) less than a second, even for very large data sets.

<comment><USER6> HBase is probably closer to what you're looking for.

<comment><USER5> Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to see an example of how people are redefining their schema with NoSQL databases (especially with document based databases like CouchDB). A common example you hear is "Your blog document can contain an array of comment nodes". Which is all great in theory but obviously won't scale.

If Digg are using Cassandra as a big key-value store then how do they look up comments for posts? If they're storing one entry per comment with an index on post ID then it's not really key based any more.

We hear a lot of case studies about performance increases, but I never seem to see any practical details on how the databases should be used correctly.

<comment><USER8> Comments are denormalized and stored two ways: One in a plain ColumnFamily (for random access) and one in a SuperCF (for sequential access).

The plain CF ("Comments") uses the comment ID (which is a timestamp+salt) as the row key. The fields of the comment are columns in the row (username, text, date_created etc).

The SuperCF ("StoryComments") uses the story ID as the row key. Each row contains one SuperColumn per comment. The SC name is the comment_id, and the columns are the fields of the comment.

So, say you want to get the first 50 comments for a given story, you'd do a get_slice on StoryComments, passing the story ID in as the row key, "" as the start column, and a count of 50. You get back 50 SuperColumns, each of which contains one comment.

Cassandra is extremely good for sequential reads, not just random lookups. Just about any list of things can be efficiently stored and retrieved with its batch insertion and slicing operations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who may have missed this a couple weeks ago, Twitter also considering Cassandra - [http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra- twitter-...](http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra-twitter-an- interview-with-ryan-king)

<comment><AUTHOR> Past the considering stage and to the "deploying" stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice to see Digg pouring effort into making Cassandra itself better for everyone.</comment>


NSA Improperly Collected U.S. Phone Records a Second Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-improperly-collected-u-s-phone-records-a-second-time-11561541520?mod=rsswn <comment> java-man not wittingly.</comment>


Ask HN: What's Next After the Agile Manifesto? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The Agile Manifesto[1] has been around for almost two decades now. It would be nice if someone finally came up with an implementation of it that was actually true to its first principle:

 _" Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"_

So far, processes (e.g., standup meetings, sprint planning meetings, retrospective meetings, lots and lots of meetings) and tools (e.g., Jira) seem to be what people emphasize the most when they push "agile" on an organization.

[1] [https://agilemanifesto.org](https://agilemanifesto.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> If there's another manifesto, I think it's a long way away. Agile doesn't seem broken, not in the way the old ways did.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gannt charts.</comment>


Ask HN: Does your company care if two (or more) users share a single account? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes</comment>


Here's Why Scoble And The The Pundits Are Wrong: Windows Phone Will Be A Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/windows-phone-2012-1

<comment><USER2> I loved Windows Phone 7. It was very fast, smooth, the UI was terrific but as a user I have one qualm: The web browser is second-rate.

Windows, I know you're trying hard with the Trident Engine, but i just don't know _why_ anymore. Why are you sinking money into Internet Explorer? Search Money? For god's sake then just switch over to webkit. You've made some amazing hardware acceleration changes etc with IE10, but if all of that was to be given to webkit and back to the community you would improve the entire internet. So why?

<comment><USER3> sunk cost fallacy?</comment></comment>


How Silicon Valley Ends - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gordonguthrie/how-silicon-valley-ends-20415cf64d16 <comment><USER2> Wow. The two things you can say is that Mr. Guthrie is not afraid to say what he thinks and he likes the word post. My 'post'-reading assessment, whether you agree with his viewpoint or you disagree, I think that Mr. Guthrie likes the sound of his own voice.</comment>


Domain Squatter sent name without payment - <AUTHOR>

Ok so obviously I am doing this from a throwaway account in order to not be thrown under the bus entirely here but i have an ethics question for you guys.
I found a domain name I really wanted for a webapp I am building and emailed the woman only to confirm that she squats on domains for a living.
She was originally asking $500 more than I could buy it directly from godaddy for (obviously she already had it for sell through them)
so I threw around the words alexa page rank and search term frequency and did my own "valuation" telling her the name was worth much less ... she agreed to sell it for a much lower price and sent me her paypal address then preceded to transfer the name through godaddy BEFORE i ever paid her.
so what does moral obligation say here? my gut says pay the lady but the part of me that hates squatters thinks it may be worth it not to
So whats the verdict? <comment><USER2> You don't know her, you don't know how she acquired the domain names or for what reason, you don't know her situation. All you know is she had a domain name, she sent it to you and trusted you to pay her. Pay her.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you did it by email she probably has enough evidence for a court case. A deal with the devil is still a deal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just because you don't like the way someone does business doesn't mean you have any right to steal from them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pay her - or you are a worse person than a Domain Squatter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seriously? Pay her.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pay. Now.</comment>


Why a Tennessee town has the fastest internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-29038650 <comment><USER2> Last month the network CEO and Mayor of Chattanooga did an AMA where they discussed setting up the fiber network and how they overcame cable operators attempts to block the network.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2ccgs2/we_are_the_gig...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2ccgs2/we_are_the_gig_city_chattanooga_tn_the_city_that/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As a grad student doing entirely computational work, it's quite nice living in Tennessee (I'm in Knoxville). Eventually I want to live in SF for a few years just to experience it, but the relaxed pace here is enjoyable. Any kind of outdoor activity is nearby (Smoky Mountains), and I like the fact that we actually have trees here compared to the west coast.

I'd like to live in a variety of places throughout my life, but when I finally pick a more permanent place of residence, it will probably be something like Chattanooga. The low cost of living is one advantage over the bigger cities. While Oak Ridge is very cutting-edge in terms of science, the south isn't near the forefront of technology like California is, so it would be nice to see at least one city around here make a push in that direction, and it seems like Chattanooga is certainly working towards it. I suppose Atlanta is working on it as well, but both have a ways to go.

<comment><USER4> RE: trees

That applies exclusively to California. Oregon and Washington are abundant with trees.

<comment><USER5> There's plenty of trees in Northern California as well. Certainly you don't need to travel _that_ long out of SF to be able to get nice leafy areas.

And a little bit further and you have big forest areas. I used to work for a guy that lived in a house in the middle of the forest near Santa Cruz, surrounded by redwood. And the Santa Cruz mountains have large portions that are classified as temperate rain forest.

<comment><USER6> "Certainly you don't need to travel that long out of SF to be able to get nice leafy areas."

You don't. Under an hour on bicycle or bus will do it.

SF also leads the nation in greenspaces, park area per capita, and has the largest urban park in the US, if not the world. Get out of SOMA once in a while, people.

EDIT: BTW, this is an example of why SFians are terrified of the onslaught of tech folks. People new to SF tend to have a very narrow view of things, taking over a year to really get even a basic feel for the city, while typically financially supporting the sort of businesses that dilute what the draw is in the first place. Anyway go on enjoying TN and come visit sometime. Book a few days extra before or after a conference and see the redwoods, they are the largest and oldest living organisms on earth.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how you measure which park in the USA is "the largest urban park". I immediately thought of Forest Park in Portland Oregon, which is larger than anything in SF.

I found this list of largest city parks: [http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933260.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933260.html)

I'm not sure what counts as 'urban' in your definition.

Also, redwoods might be the largest trees on earth, but not the largest organisms. And they're not the oldest trees on earth either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I get why people here are jazzed about government offering the service (yeah! government cures all ills!). Let me offer another look.

Small town in GA does the same. Cable is offered through CNS. Here is the About CNS:

In 1995, the City of Thomasville began building a fiber optic network to serve local schools, libraries, businesses and hospitals with telecommunications and Internet services. After seeing success in this limited offering, it was identified that the community at large would be able to benefit from access to high-speed Internet. So, in 1998, in order to better serve the community, the City of Thomasville began construction of a new high-speed, fiber-optic network and in 1999, CNS, or Community Network Services, was created. In 1997, the Cities of Cairo, Camilla, Moultrie and Thomasville joined forces in order to better serve the citizens of each community. This multi-city partnership, titled the South Georgia Governmental Services Authority (SGGSA), enabled CNS to further expand its services to communities that were in need of high-speed Internet, television and telecommunications services, and, in 2001, these services were provided to all SGGSA cities. The best part about CNS is that it is funded locally, by the cities which it serves. This means if you are a CNS customer, you are investing in your own communities, not a corporation headquartered across the country.

The problem is, we are stuck with dated hardware and software and NO competition from Comcast/AT&T, etc. I wish I could show screenshots of the cable TV on demand interface - it looks like DOS. The cable box itself is the size of those old school VCRs that took up the entire cabinet. The internet has reported speeds up to 35 MBS, but the service is totally unreliable. Tons of dropped packets, etc. I have never seen past about 20 MBS even though we pay for 35 ($59/month).

The big cable companies won't enter the market because CNS has the monopoly and CNS isn't motivated to keep up to date because there is no competition and because it probably doesn't have the money to truly invest. Mediacom does offer service in the area, but reported 3-4 weeks before they could install and reviews of the service are terrible too.

I guess the point is, any monopoly sucks, whether a government run one or a corporate run one.

<comment><USER9> But is there any reason Comcast or AT&T is prohibited from entering the market and competing? If there is a demand for improved services, shouldn't they be able to do well regardless? Likely there are other reasons that make the market less attractive and not likely to be a hotbed of competition even if the CNS didn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gigabit networks are not that rare. There is a community network in Czech city Plzen with 22K members. It was build by volunteers over past ten years and still growing strong.

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fe- svet.e15.cz%2Finternet%2Fjak-si-komunita-v-plzni-postavila-nejrychlejsi- internet-na-svete-1114189&edit-text=)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is one of the many reasons that the Ambition (YC) team is in Chattanooga. I am from Tennessee myself. Chattanooga is a nice place. You can literally buy a home ([http://bit.ly/1tvb9ta](http://bit.ly/1tvb9ta)) for what folks in SF send on rent for one year (~24k). That being said I still choose to live in SF.

<comment><USER12> That house is likely going to cost someone much more than 24k.

Look at all the flags: for sale at 1/3 the estimated value, estimated mortgage is 1/10 the estimated rent value, 3 year listing, listing removed at least once, numerous price drops, no cooling, and 94 years old.

That is what we call a fixer-upper with problems.

Not saying it couldn't be fixed and could be a good home for the right person, but let's be realistic about the house.

<comment><USER13> Well, sure, but the mere fact that _any_ real estate is available for such a pittance is incredible as compared to prices in traditional tech hubs (San Fran, Boston, NYC, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Chattanooga is beyond beautiful. It's probably the prettiest part of the state outside of Franklin.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm by no means an economic expert, but more of these discussions need more discussion about "natural monopoly"

anyone here against the idea that the last-mile/access network is a natural monopoly?

<comment><USER16> _The theory of natural monopoly is an economic fiction. No such thing as a 'natural' monopoly has ever existed_

[http://mises.org/daily/5266/](http://mises.org/daily/5266/)

<comment><USER17> Thomas DiLorenzo is indeed an economist who holds that view, but my impression is that the view is relatively unusual and not widely shared in the profession.

<comment><USER16> Yes, you are right, not many economists share this view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be great to live in a place with such fast internet speeds. Here, 10MB/s is considered way above average, so imagine.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why? Because "no telco", that's why. :)</comment>


The unexpectedly most successful category on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/10/18/kickstarter-category-dance/

<comment><USER2> Great reminder ( and stats ) that kickstarter is more than tech; my brother just raised $40K on kickstarter for a Texas Pecan Liqueur "pecano". When he said he was going to do it, I told him he was crazy. I was completely wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: Has there been a spike in layoffs or belt tightening recently? - <AUTHOR> What are people seeing in the tech sector anecdotally ? I've been reading about layoffs at Mozilla, Intel, Quora, StubHub, 23AndMe, Oyo.<p>It seems to be the start of a down trend. <comment><USER2> I work on the tech side of vehicle manufacturing and while white collar layoffs haven't hit yet, it's getting bad. See [1]. Freight movement is down significantly and trucking companies are going bankrupt all over the place. Truck order forecasts for 2020 are _way_ down from a year ago, and passenger car isn't looking too hot either. This likely won't spill into the advertising-based SV tech economy for a while, though.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-companies- bankrupt-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-companies-bankrupt- list-truckers-react-to-industry-bloodbath-2019-7)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think some of the looser outfits in the Bay Area are being shook out. For each one of those names there were problems in terms of product-market fit. (e.g. Intel can't get 10 nm to market)

In the bigger economy I am concerned by the pause in 737 production which must be hitting suppliers, employees, their families, businesses they frequent, the state welfare budget, etc.

At the higher end of higher ed in the US we recruit foreign students, faculty, and staff who become part of our networks and it would be unhealthy for us if any sort of foreigner such as Chinese, Muslim, African or otherwise did not feel comfortable here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have been quite a few negative economic indicators in the last six months or so, but not particularly decisive. Hard to say which way the trend will go.

It's an election year so the government will stop at nothing to avoid a recession however.

<comment><USER5> Being an election year, many people in the government would stop at nothing to cause a recession.

<comment><USER4> The Fed and to some extent the Prez are "the deciders," and we know which direction they'll support. But, you probably know that already.

<comment><USER5> Yes, exactly opposite to each other. They are not friends.

<comment><USER4> No, the fed supports the incumbent government by smoothing the business cycle. Even Volcker had tacit support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ive heard intel are carving staff like nobodys business but i assumed that was because theyve been losing so much ground to amd amongst other things

i think if they fail to pull something significant out of the bag very soon they could be in serious trouble, especially if the likes of apple decide to make the switch to amd chips, sure they just posted better than expected revenue but were only just seeing the start of amds rise</comment>


A123 sues Apple, says it poached battery engineers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/A123-sues-Apple-says-it-poached-battery-engineers-6090613.php

<comment><USER2> By filing suit in an out of state court first.

</comment><comment><USER3> So remind me again how do you enforce non competes in CA :-)</comment>


Was Tumblr Hacked? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tumblr.com

<comment><USER2> down for me</comment>


Ask HN: Why didn't SARS spread like Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> I recently read an article from Bloomberg claiming that SARS was more contagious (3.0 vs 2.8 RO) than COVID-19. If this is true, why were there only 8,000 cases? Here is the link: https://www.bloombergquint.com/opinion/how-bad-is-the-coronavirus-let-s-compare-with-sars-ebola-flu <comment><USER2> I've seen two reasons named:

a) SARS had a shorter incubation period, so people got seriously ill and isolated quicker

b) The virus now is a lot more present in the upper respiratory system, even before symptoms appear, and thus spread more easily during the longer unrecognized period, whereas if you were highly contagious for SARS you also were quite sick already

</comment><comment><USER3> I read recently that SARS symptoms appeared near the infection time so it was easier to observe. MERS had a small replication value so it wasn't as virulent.</comment>


Study says eyes evolved for X-Ray vision - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news139138581.html

<comment><USER2> If the folks who wrote this article wanted to be taken even a little bit seriously, they should have spent at least a little time addressing the prevailing belief that eye position evolves as a trade off between depth perception and a wide field of view. I'm going to go ahead and give the researchers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their research was just misunderstood be the writers, but that just makes this article that much more pathetic.

<comment><USER3> Not only did they completely miss the depth perception vs. wide field view crack in their theory, but they are clearly link-baiting. X-Ray vision is a common term every one knows, not just comic book collectors, and this is not it. This is just link-bait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Despite the harsh criticisms by others here (and right on, the site is link- bait), the site points to a paper in Journal of Theoretical Biology worth reading.

The thesis of the paper is that binocular vision evolved to see through clutter such as small leaves near one's face.

"X-ray vision" and the evolution of forward-facing eyes

Mark A. Changizin and Shinsuke Shimojoc. J. Theoretical Biology. July 15, 2008.

Abstract: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18682253?ordinalpos=1&...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18682253?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum)

PDF: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6WMD-4T0FFD4-4-K&_cdi=6932&_user=5294990&_orig=search&_coverDate=07%2F15%2F2008&_sk=999999999&view=c&wchp=dGLzVzz- zSkWA&md5=99161923323bcc5cb7262faa80313d3c&ie=/sdarticle.pdf)</comment>